Gilded Lily

by Isabel Vincent

  By contrast, Vera Chvidchenko, Alfredo’s secretary in the 1960s, had a great deal to say. For the first time in more than four decades, she spoke about her visit to the coroner’s office the day after Alfredo died. “I never believed that Fred committed suicide,” said Vera in an interview at her office in Rio. Neither, it seems, did the coroner, who did not find gunpowder residue on his hands, and who told Vera that if Alfredo did commit suicide, the shots that entered his thorax could only have been fired with his left hand. But somewhere along the way to the police station or the coroner’s office or both, money changed hands, Vera said.

  Shortly after Alfredo died, Vera left Ponto Frio to study law. She said she soured on the company after its director Geraldo Mattos forced her to sign over a building that she had purchased on Alfredo’s behalf in downtown Rio. Alfredo, who put up the cash, asked her to put the deed in her name for tax reasons. “Of course, I could have demanded a great deal of money to surrender the building after he died, but I didn’t ask for anything,” said Vera, who still works as a senior partner in a downtown law firm. “I was just completely disgusted with everything they did with the company after Fred died. I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.”

  But Vera holds no grudge against Lily and is grateful for the bottles of perfume that Lily gives her every time she comes to Brazil on a visit, which is not often anymore.

  In the end, even Geraldo Mattos didn’t have the stomach for the new Ponto Frio. Geraldo, who was summoned to meetings in Geneva with Edmond after Alfredo died, didn’t like what he was seeing. The meetings were held in a boardroom of Edmond Safra’s Trade Development Bank. Edmond sat next to a shredder and regularly destroyed his memos to the Brazilian company in Geraldo’s presence.

  Although he once promised Alfredo that he would stay with the company until Carlos turned twenty-one, Geraldo tendered his resignation to Lily and Edmond in Geneva in March 1974, less than five years after Alfredo died. “This is the last trip that I make to Geneva,” he wrote on an airline menu, which his daughter Sonia found amongst his old papers when he died. “This is a decisive moment in my life. I believe that what I should have done, I did. I want to continue to be successful and to create something for my children.”

  Lily called Geraldo her “thief-director” because he had held onto several million dollars worth of shares that were signed over to him by Alfredo when he was in a state of euphoria. Geraldo’s family denied that this was the case, but did acknowledge that part of his job after Alfredo died was to send profits from the company offshore to an account that his widow controlled.

  “My father was in charge of Ponto Frio after Fred died, but the new owners treated him badly,” said Geraldo’s daughter Sonia.

  With the $5 million in a settlement that he was able to obtain from the company after his resignation, Geraldo, a balding, heavyset executive with a perfectly trimmed mustache, opened his own small chain of appliance stores in Rio. Although he was successful for a few years, he sold the firm to a businessman who, unbeknownst to him, was tied to Edmond Safra. The businessman refused to pay, and Geraldo spent the rest of his life in costly litigation. He never told his family that he had lost everything; they found out after his death when they had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in remaining litigation fees.

  Laurinda Soares Navarro also feels that she lost everything after the death of her beloved boss. Although Lily had asked Alfredo’s old housekeeper to accompany her to London, Laurinda politely declined. She needed to look after her two sons, Adilson and Ademir. But a few years after Alfredo died, Laurinda lost Ademir to an assassin’s bullet—a victim of the drug violence that now regularly rips through Rio de Janeiro’s teeming favelas. Today Laurinda, who recently retired from her cleaning job at Rio’s Catholic University, lives alone in a small apartment on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, attended by her son Adilson, a taxi driver, who still lives in the old favela with his own family. When I interviewed her for this book, Laurinda, seventy-seven, had tears in her eyes when she spoke about Seu Alfredo, and kissed one of the black-and-white photographs from the autopsy that I showed her.

  “We know everything and we know nothing,” was how she summed up August 25, 1969, the day Alfredo died and the day her life changed forever.

  TODAY, THE HOUSE on Rua Icatu that was the scene of so much tragedy in 1969 is full of life again. Marcelo and Klara Steinfeld, who bought the house from Lily, raised their children there, and after Klara’s death, Marcelo married a younger, lively Argentine woman who spends a great deal of her time tending the garden and grooming the couple’s dogs. The Steinfelds are not fazed by the events that took place in their master bedroom four decades earlier, although they concede that Lily’s life has been marked by “too much tragedy” since Alfredo’s death.

  The street itself has probably changed little from Alfredo’s day. It is still a quiet neighborhood of lush mango trees, dotted by colorful orchids and hibiscus, where tamarind monkeys stop in bemused attention to stare at passersby as they climb up the mountain. Some of the houses are bigger, though, and they are set back behind large mechanized wrought-iron gates, monitored by doormen carrying walkie-talkies—a sign of the violence that has gripped the city in the years since Alfredo’s death.

  SEVERAL YEARS AFTER Edmond’s death Lily sold the Monaco penthouse that she had so painstakingly decorated with mirrored walls covered in peach-colored treillage at the entrance and faux Fragonard murals and swans hand-painted on the elevator doors. Although she now identifies herself as a citizen of Monaco (Brazil has been conveniently forgotten) and still uses the principality as her home base, nobody could blame her for selling off the penthouse, with its terrible memories of the fire and Edmond’s death.

  But despite her attempts to liquidate the recent past, it haunts her still, mostly in the unanswered questions that remain after Ted Maher’s trial in 2002. “It was never explained satisfactorily why she [Lily] had taken the keys to the apartment away from all the employees shortly before the tragedy,” wrote Dominick Dunne. “The greatest unexplained question will always be why there was no guard on duty that night since the Safras maintained a private cadre of 11 guards trained by the Mossad.”

  A decade later, it is impossible to corroborate anything Maher has said. Were there intruders in the apartment? It’s impossible to say since the surveillance tapes were mysteriously erased. Did Ted act alone or was he a pawn of a much bigger conspiracy?

  Over the years, Ted’s statements about December 3, 1999, became so confused that it’s impossible to say with any certainty what exactly took place on that winter morning in one of the world’s most privileged and security-obsessed enclaves.

  For their part, Edmond’s brothers and sisters want nothing to do with Monaco. Edmond’s death still weighs heavily on them a decade after his passing. “It was a really stupid death,” said one family member who did not want to be identified. “What can I say? Nobody investigated. Nobody found anything. To this day, we are still disgusted with everything that happened. No one in the family has returned to Monaco since the trial, and we will never return there.”

  And what of relations with their billionaire sister-in-law, Lily Safra? Hard to say, since the Safras have never spoken about her publicly. The cryptic press release they issued after Edmond’s death was the first and last word on the woman they are still linked to in name.

  But only in name.

  “Every family has issues, but everything is settled now,” said the Safra family member, matter-of-factly. “There was no court; everything was settled out of court.”

  For Samuel Bendahan, Lily’s third husband, little was ever settled—in a court or outside of one. Bendahan, now seventy-four, has spent a lifetime trying to figure out why his fairy-tale marriage came apart at the seams. His answer? Edmond Safra, the man he says ruined his entire life. Bendahan claims that the stress he suffered when he was jailed in New York and the protracted legal actions that followed were directly responsible for the onset of h
is stomach cancer.

  Strangely, he feels no ill will towards his former wife, who he believes was simply forced to do Edmond’s bidding because of the large sum of money she had inherited from Alfredo and which Edmond controlled. After the end of the lawsuits against him, Bendahan retreated to his property in southern Spain. He never married. His goal in speaking so openly about his former wife is his own public redemption. He was not the “gigolo” third husband of Lily Safra, but a businessman from a distinguished Jewish family who fell in love with a young widow who was once also passionate about him.

  “Even I am [now] surprised about how little I knew about Lily’s past,” wrote Bendahan in an e-mail. “In computer parlance, what I saw is what I got, and what I saw was most pleasing and fulfilling. Our time together was far too good to have to rely on ‘What was your favorite subject at school? What was he like in bed?’”

  Following the settlement of all the other lawsuits against Lily after Edmond’s death, Lily turned to other matters. For years there were rumors that she had received offers to sell her villa in the south of France. In one of the earliest rumors, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was said to be interested in the property. Then the Russian oligarchs got involved. Press reports recounted how she had sold the property to Roman Abramovich, Russian billionaire and owner of the Chelsea Football Club. But the rumors proved to be false.

  However, the home was provisionally sold to another Russian billionaire before the worldwide recession put a dent in Lily’s plans. In 2008, Lily reached a deal with Mikhail Prokhorov, who offered her $500 million for the estate—a staggering sum of money that would have made La Leopolda the world’s most expensive residential property. Prokhorov, the former owner of Norilsk Nickel, put down a 10 percent deposit in the summer of 2008 but backed out of the deal in February 2009. He demanded his deposit back after he lost money in the severe economic downturn, but Lily refused. For her part, she had not wanted to sell the house at any price but reached an agreement after repeated requests on Prokhorov’s behalf. At first, Prokhorov said no deal was made, but the Financial Times found a deposit from a subsidiary of a company called Atenaco, which Prokhorov controlled.

  Prokhorov, a self-made billionaire, was no stranger to controversy. In January 2007, he was detained by French police in the ski resort of Courchevel in a case of suspected high-class prostitution although no charges were brought against him.

  Lily, who had already moved out the furniture and had agreed to a penalty if she reneged on the deal, refused to be moved by the economic crisis and the Russian billionaire’s economic woes. In a press release, she noted that she would not return Prokhorov’s deposit. She said that she would distribute the $55 million to numerous charities, including the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research in New York (€2 million) and the Claude Pompidou Institute for Alzheimer’s Disease in Nice (€8 million). Her biggest contribution of €10 million was destined for Harvard University, for the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.

  “By transforming the purchase deposit into an act of giving, I would like to encourage all who can do so to support medical research, patient care, education and other important humanitarian causes during these times of economic uncertainty,” she said in a press release.

  Dividing her time between her apartment in New York City and homes in London and Monaco, Lily continues to give generously to her pet causes and is a regular fixture at society events in Europe and New York. Through the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation, which she has chaired since Edmond’s death, she is an important supporter of medical research into cancer, AIDS, and humanitarian relief and education around the world. She endowed the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard and has given away more than 16,000 scholarships to needy students in Israel for university education since the 1977 founding of the International Sephardic Education Foundation, the charity she created with Edmond and Nina Weiner.

  Lily was a lead supporter of the American Red Cross’s relief effort in New Orleans after the 2005 hurricane. Her support allowed Dillard University in New Orleans to offer temporary classes in the aftermath of the hurricane and helped the school rebuild the campus for the fall 2006 semester. She is a member of the board of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and she financed the construction of the Safra Family Lodge at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2005. The Safra Family Lodge, an English arts and crafts manor surrounded by a beautiful garden, provides a retreat for the families of patients who are receiving care at the clinical center. The garden is named after Claudio and Evelyne Cohen, and includes a fountain dedicated to the memory of Raphael Cohen, Lily’s grandson.

  Lily’s generosity has been honored all over the world. In 2004, the French government gave her the rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des arts et des lettres and a year later she was named a Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur by then president Jacques Chirac. She is an honorary fellow of King’s College London and the Courtauld Institute of Art, whose programs she has generously supported. She also holds honorary doctorates from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Brandeis University, where she established the Lily Safra Internship Program at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, which allows six undergraduates and two graduate students to conduct research in Jewish and women’s studies every summer.

  In the United States, she supports a myriad of community organizations and is a member of the Chairman’s Council of the Museum of Modern Art, the Kennedy Center’s International Committee on the Arts, and a trustee of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. In Washington, she established the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professorship at the National Gallery of Art.

  She is a regal presence at philanthropic galas, where she inevitably shows up in gorgeous couture, her short hair beautifully styled. With no man in her life these days (at least no one she is ever seen with publicly), the grand dame now appears at many events accompanied by her granddaughter, who is beautiful and blonde and whose name also is Lily. At other events, she has been photographed with her daughter, Adriana, and her other grandchildren. Her son Eduardo, who owns an antiques business in the more fashionable part of Buenos Aires, is absent from any recent photos, although he appeared at Ponto Frio’s sixtieth-anniversary celebrations in Rio de Janeiro in 2006. He was pictured in the Rio society columns, among the city’s glitterati, wearing a Ponto Frio T-shirt at the company party that drew hundreds of people.

  In spite of the money and glamour, the parties and charities, and her public profile, the life of Lily Watkins Cohen Monteverde Bendahan Safra has had more than its share of tragedy. The woman herself remains inscrutable.

  “DO YOU KNOW Dona Lily?”

  The question was directed to no one in particular. Marcos, the tall, sunburned administrator of the Caju cemetery, put a hand up to his forehead to shield his eyes from the blistering afternoon sunshine.

  Marcos hails from Lebanon and claims to have gone to school with Edmond Safra. He says he has repeatedly tried to get in touch with Lily Safra over the years through her son-in-law, Michel Elia, who used to oversee Ponto Frio. Yes, he knows that these are very busy and important people, but they owe a sacred duty to the dead, he says. The headstones of the Watkins, Cohens, and Monteverdes all need upkeep. It costs little more than $50 to clean a headstone, $15 to re-carve each of the fading letters, he said.

  “They haven’t paid anything in years, and look at the headstones now,” said Marcos, who wore a yarmulke and short-sleeved, button-down shirt as he took a visitor through the Caju cemetery. “The stones are dirty and falling apart. Some of the letters need to be redone. They all need to be cleaned. What am I supposed to do?”

  Marcos stopped at the grave of Alfredo Monteverde, which is situated a short distance from the graves of the Watkins family towards the back of the cemetery. The headstone of Lily’s second husband, whose death became the seminal event in her life, is dirty and the letters are fading.

  Alfredo’s remains lie clo
se to those of his mother, Regina Rebecca Monteverde, who died in 1976, the same year that Lily finally married Edmond Safra in a low-key ceremony in Geneva. After the death of her beloved son, Regina was a broken woman. She tried everything to investigate what she always believed to be his murder, and tried to prevent her former daughter-in-law from taking over Globex, which Regina always considered a family company because it was built from the gold that the Monteverdes brought to Brazil from Romania.

  “Even though she could be really nasty to Fred, he was really her whole life,” said Alfredo’s old secretary Vera, who remained close to Regina until her death. “He was the most important thing in her world.”

  He was also the most important man in Lily’s life—even more significant than her father and Edmond Safra. Although they were married for just over four years, Lily inherited a vast family fortune that enabled her to live the fairy tale she had dreamed of when she was a teenager in a lilac organza dress, hoping to catch the eye of a young man with money at the CIB socials. It was only after Alfredo’s sudden death that Lily was quickly able to launch herself into the rarefied world of couture gowns and sumptuous parties on two continents.

  Despite his immense importance in the course of Lily’s life and his dominance of Rio business circles in the 1960s, Alfredo Monteverde has been largely forgotten. There were only two stones on his tombstone when I visited recently, which probably means that he has had few visitors at the cemetery.

  But in 2007, Alfredo enjoyed a renaissance of sorts. Across town from the gritty cemetery, in a well-appointed Copacabana apartment, an elderly woman with a continental accent gathered up a bundle of T-shirts, all of them with a silk-screened impression of Alfredo Monteverde. The photo of the founder of Ponto Frio was taken when he was a young man, on the ski slopes in Switzerland or France. He is suntanned and handsome, his gaze full of hope and possibility.